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Chinese Develop Remote Controlled Pigeons
Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired's, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, "A number of obvious uses jump out to me... the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549."
"crap on specified targets"
Why stop at crapping on targets?. I bet the American security services are worried. Now there's a real risk of using one of these Pigeons as a remote spying device. Imagine an innocent looking pigeon sitting on a window ledge, but really its fitted with a microphone and remote control. It would be ideal for spying.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Today if you want. In fact yesterday. The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.
To the point:
The primary sensory and locomotor areas of the brain are very well mapped (and have been so for 20+ years now). It is trivial to implant electrodes into a sensory area which will cause you extreme pain perceived to be in a specific area. From there on you just hook the unit to a set of simple inertial sensors and deliver pain until the target turns right, left or wherever the command is. Approximate complexity of this when using sensors like the ones in the IBM and apple notebooks is at the high school student project level. From there on it is only a matter of calibrating the pain feedback loops so that the target does not pass out. In fact you do not even need to implant electrodes into specific left/right locomotor areas. Just pain/pleasure in general will be enough to get the job done (and there is nothing the test animal can do about it). Also, once the target is trained the actual commands can be delivered with minimal stimulation levels.
All I can say - this is Dr. Evil at his best and there is nothing cool, scientific, revolutionary or extremely funny in this. In fact it gives me shivers just to think about it. Vivisection at its very worst.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
This might be the ultimate spying device: hook up a tiny camera or mike to a pigeon and command it to fly to the window of an embassy, the Pentagon, etc.
Of course, political assassinations via C4 bombs delivered by pigeons might be a possibility, too. Or, biological/chemical agent delivery to otherwise protected areas...
I am having some tiny chills running down my spine.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It is not at that level.
It is just pain feedback (optionally with pleasure via thalamic stimulation) along with some trivial conditioning. I am fairly sure about this being so because we do not understand how a bird flies aerodynamically and do not have good enough mapping of second and higher level functions of the mammal brain to control it any better.
This means that if this is applied to soldiers they can still do things their masters do not like, just get punished more and more if they do. Nearly impossible for an animal to override such conditioning, but achieveable for a human. Dune and the Bene Gesserit test comes to mind along with many "manhood" tests performed by South (using fire ants) and North American Indians.
None the less, the only question I am interested is the longitude, latitude and altitude of this chap lab.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Nazi KZ Doctors???
Pigeons are not people....
Repeat that a couple of times, please, perhaps it will sink in.
A lot of this un-ethical kind of stuff is going on in your backyard university lab probably, it's just not in the news. Russians tried to do the same with dolphins and other animals, Israelis do this with monkeys (see hear ). You should go tour your local pig farm and see how those animals are treated.
Just because these are Chinese scientists, i.e. foreigners (and of course, probably commie terrorists, right?) that we are all appalled.
Something similar was devised during WWII, but using bats instead of pigeons (and without quite the same level of control). Check it out here.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol